


The Fringe fox and the Reckless Rabbit

by Falke



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: Action, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Angst, Gen, Original Character(s), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8248738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falke/pseuds/Falke
Summary: "It's happening, Nick, like it or not. We've been taking mammals in for months, and they all have the same message. Without augs, you're a subclass. You won't keep up. You can't compete.""Obviously you don't believe that. You're still on the force."Or: the story of how a smuggler got sucked into a certain policerabbit's life.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a one-shot prompt from /trash/ that I posted to my collection. I expanded it into a longer piece on a prompt from [Halistree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halistree).

_Tundratown Border_  
_Maintenance Tunnel 6-B_  
_Two hours into_ enhanced _patrol operations_

_Wrong place, wrong time._

There was a tiny voice in Nick Wilde's head that got distractingly loud sometimes, and it was always when he was in the middle of something that needed his full focus, like removing this access plate without attracting too much attention. Not that the noise of his tools would carry out of the tunnel into the sheeting rain, or get picked up by any of the sensors in here. The little shim he'd jammed into the network would take care of that, for at least the next few minutes.

So what was the problem, he asked himself. The police out there had bigger fish to fry with their little aug roundup party. None of them had time to worry about the scrappy fox in the tunnel, or the stash of not-verifiably-illegal hardware he was picking up from the dead-drop. This wasn't hurting anyone. Right?

Nick gritted his teeth and pulled the hatch shut behind him. If he didn't know better, he'd say he was developing a conscience.

This part of the tunnel was even dimmer, bathed in the red-orange of emergency lighting. Nick's eyes adjusted, and he started to relax. There were no cameras down here to worry about spiking; if anyone out there caught on to his presence he'd hear them coming in plenty of time thanks to the feed from dispatch going on his headset. It was cramped, too - most of the bruisers out there wouldn't even fit in here.

And the case was right where it was supposed to be, behind the data pipes for this section of the tunnel where only the maintenance bots ever poked around.

Nick tucked it under his arm, checked his map for the new route out, turned to duck under a low-hanging stanchion-

And fifty thousand volts dumped him on his back. Nick yelped.

Blindsided.

And as his vision cleared he groaned. Of course. Of _course_ she wouldn't have just disappeared.

Judy Hopps, anomalous rabbit cop and near-constant pain in Nick's tail, was back from her long, blessed, unexplained absence. She scowled down at him past the flicker of the stun baton in her armor. There was still moisture beading on her clothes.

Nick dropped his head to the chipped concrete. "Hi."

Her jaw worked. Was she suppressing a smile?

"Did you miss me?"

"Three months is a long time," Nick said. "What happened that's keeping you so busy? Your chief put you on sanitation duty or something?"

Judy ignored the question. Her compliance tool deactivated and slid back into the housing on her gauntlet. "Nicholas Wilde, you're under arrest."

"You are so straight-arrow it's actually offensive, Carrots." _Oh,_ it hurt to breathe. She hadn't zapped him in a while.

Her eyes narrowed at the nickname. "And you keep getting into trouble. Your network spikes are a nice touch, but they're getting pretty signature. This is trespassing." She nudged the little armored box Nick had dropped with a grey-furred foot. "And maybe trafficking, too. What's in the case?"

Nick pushed himself up to his elbows. "Well, maybe if I could afford a nice neural implant I wouldn't need data shims."

"The case, Nick."

"I even timed it with your friends out there, so they wouldn't worry about little old me. Doesn't ZPD have actual criminals to catch? Drugs? Cloning?"

Her thumb twitched, near the glove controls for her batons. "Nick."

"I don't know. Seriously."

Judy sighed and - when he made it clear he wasn't going to get up and risk another shock - knelt by the case. He watched her, alarmed despite himself. He never opened the cases, because he figured - rightly - he was better off not knowing what the mammals he occasionally made deliveries for were dealing in. Now he was getting visions of booby traps. Tiny explosives, or poison gas.

"Carrots."

"Shut it." She was staring at the box, and after a moment reached down and flipped the catches. Nick braced himself-

-for a neat row of little silicon squares, packed edge-on in custom foam. Judy plucked one out and studied it. Her eyes widened.

"Nick, what are you wrapped up in?" She replaced the chip and whipped out a set of cuffs, applying them so expertly Nick barely had time to move. "Where did you get these?"

"Listen, I don't even know what they are." He frowned. "How do you?"

She was distressed. More so than any of the... seventeen other times she'd tangled with him before. Not that Nick counted. Judy looked down the hallway, and paced a few steps.

"These are neural chips. For controlling augs. Almost military-spec."

"Like the ones ZPD uses?"

"Stronger." Her eyes flashed. "Civilian augs can be dangerous enough, attached to the right mammal. These chips-" She looked down at the case. "Someone could turn themselves into a weapon. Six someones."

Augmentation was an arms race, no matter how much the corporations wrapped their offerings up in glamorous presentation. It gave mammals edges over other mammals. Prey could get claws. Predators could get sharper claws. Anyone with the cash could get faster and stronger overnight.

ZPD wasn't an exception, Nick knew. Most of the officers Nick passed on the streets these days sported something shiny and upgraded. Cybernetic rhinos. Bears with carbon-composite arms, tearing the doors off crashed vehicles to help trapped passengers. The department had even paraded its pursuit cheetahs around, who could hit a hundred miles an hour on their prosthetic legs now, and hold it.

It was obscene, in his opinion. And ominous. To stay ahead, criminals had to augment themselves, too, and being criminals they had fewer scruples. More sharp edges. It added more tension to the cityscape, and shot a fresh divide down the center of its population: between those who retained their natural abilities, and those who sought to push past them - for better or for worse.

Nick tried not to think too hard about it. For him, for someone who couldn't afford even the most basic of implants, it was just one more aspect to a checkered string of jobs. If mammals wanted augs, and other mammals wanted to deliver aug parts and were willing to pay him to carry the materials, he didn't see how that was his business. He was just getting by. What others did with themselves wasn't his problem.

It was officer Hopps' problem, though, came the grating little voice in his head. She was still pacing.

"Where were you taking these?"

"Dead drop." Why was he cooperating? He didn't owe her anything, not after she kept shocking him. He couldn't even complain about that; the department would just laugh him out of the building again. "How did you find me? I'm working in gaps here."

"I don't use the network for that," Judy said. She frowned. "I don't like relying on it. So I watch where it doesn't cover." She fixed him with a critical look. "Or where it _drops out._ "

Good old-fashioned policing. Nick hid his smile. "No idea what you're talking about."

"You're going to get yourself hurt, doing this."

Spoken as if she hadn't just dosed him with enough electricity to stop an elephant. "You're doing plenty of the hurting for both of us already."

"I mean it, Nick." She shook her head. "You should go back to pawpsicles before you get any deeper. I know you listen in to the police band, watch the traffic. You can see it's getting tense out there. Dangerous."

"You mean the way your colleagues are out there corralling augmented citizens right now?"

"Unlicensed augmentation is a threat to public security," she shot back, and gestured at the chips. "You want to look at this and argue otherwise?"

"You opened the case."

"Stop it. I'm awfully familiar with your record, Nick. You can't afford to get mixed up in organized crime. We've been finding runners, doing the things you're doing now. They're all stock. They've all ended up dead."

" _Stock._ " Nick spat the word. "Please don't tell me you're buying into that, too."

"It's happening, like it or not. We've been taking mammals in for months, and they all have the same message. Without augs, you're a subclass. You won't keep up. You can't compete."

"Obviously you don't believe that. You're still on the force."

Judy looked away. "Where's your dead drop?"

"What, you're going to do my dirty work for me now? How am I supposed to get paid?"

"If someone's giving mammals hardware this advanced, we need to stop it as soon as we can," Judy said. "Before it gets any worse." She shifted. "I can't pay you. But I can _not_ arrest you."

"It's not like you've ever made that stick before," Nick said. "You'll have to do better."

"What do you want, Nick?"

"To survive, same as anyone," Nick said.

"Then get out. Start running information for ZPD. Something. We could set you up tomorrow."

"And paint a target on my own back?" Nick shook his head. "We all do what we have to. And I was doing fine, before you and your stun sticks said hello."

"You didn't know about this."

No, he hadn't. Not by choice, anyway. If he'd looked that closely at it he would have left it alone. She knew he couldn't exactly argue the principle of the thing, either. She was right: he couldn't afford the wrong kind of attention.

Not that she could, either. ZPD's lone rabbit attracted a lot of nasty focus as it was - Nick was plugged far enough into the fringe to notice that, and it made him uneasy in ways he never could quite place. Scale was a pressure point in this city, and predator/prey differences, and now augs. She was on the wrong side of all of them, and she charged ahead regardless. One of these days her luck was going to run out.

"You won't be any safer than I would be."

"I know the risks."

"Not like this, Carrots." Her eyes flashed again, but Nick let it roll off and went on compromising his own deniability for her. "You - you, specifically - don't want to tangle with these mammals. An unaugged rabbit? ZPD or no, you'll be lucky if you don't just _vanish._ "

She watched him. "I have a job to do."

If only stubborn idealism were a tangible substitute for synthetic legs, he thought, or upgraded ears. Not that she'd need those. She heard everything already. Could jump seven feet straight up. She didn't need to be faster.

And yet she was still staring at him, as if she knew even more than usual that he was wrong.

The uneasiness was back, cooling in his chest where she'd hit him. She wouldn't.

But three months was about right. If she hadn't been busy, but recovering-

"What did they do to you?" He asked, and her ears confirmed it. "You don't have the mass for augs."

"No."

Was it neural? His bootleg scanner hadn't picked any other networks up, for what that was worth. A rebreather? She was a decent runner, he'd learned that the hard way-

No, it was worse.

"Your eyes."

She blinked, and now that Nick knew what he was looking for he was sure of it. They almost glowed purple in the gloom. "Tell me you didn't give them your eyes."

"Better than yours, now," Judy murmured, and narrowed them. "Infrared, magnification, network, the full package."

Nick had sat upright. Closer. "And did they tell you what happens when they fail?"

They were better at telegraphing the emotion now, too. She finally looked away. "If."

" _When._ Retinal prostheses have a forty percent rejection chance, Carrots. And it just keeps climbing with age. You'll go blind."

Judy flinched, and those angry, beautiful, awful eyes nearly pinned him to the wall again. "We all do what we have to."

She loved her job so much. The easy parts, the hard parts, the strange relationship they'd built over the years that swung from friendly antagonism to cooperation to petty vengeance and back again. The fringe fox and the reckless rabbit.

Judy had sacrificed to keep up. To run with the rest of an increasingly dangerous profession, to do the only thing she'd ever wanted or known how to do. It was as much survival as what Nick had become.

He wondered if that was what she saw him doing.

"Where is your dead drop, Nick? I can cut you loose right now."

Nick sighed. "I'll give you the coordinates, as long as you promise you won't go in without backup."

"A dead drop is supposed to be quiet."

"It's supposed to be." Nick agreed. He tilted his ears back up the tunnel. "You just ran me through the risks yourself, though. Why take chances?"

"You know, I think I can hear your conscience from here."

"You, too, huh?"

Judy bent to release the cuffs - fearless as ever, even around his claws - and Nick took out his phone.

"Launder this, yeah?"

"We know what we're doing, Nick. None of this will come back to you." Judy looked him up and down. "You're more useful in one piece anyway."

He let her have the chips, and he was glad they were a small enough package to be inconspicuous.

Judy pointed him up the tunnel. "There's a service access-"

"-at the far end, I know."

They walked together. Judy took to the ladder first. It would be less suspicious if she left before he did, in case either of them were being watched.

She paused four rungs up, at his eye level.

"I'm serious, by the way. If you ever want out. A new chance."

"And so am I, about being careful. I don't think either of us are going to listen to each other."

Judy rolled her eyes. "Remind me to really arrest you next time."

At least that meant there would be a next time. Nick watched her climb the ladder to the surface.

The glint of her purple eyes held his for a long moment before she shut the hatch between them.


	2. Chapter 2

_Nick's Apartment_  
_2345_

Nicholas Wilde was almost always doing something he could be arrested for. That was just how life worked when you knew just enough to be dangerous around a computer network, and spent most of your time doing odd jobs the legitimate couriers were too skittish to handle. He was pure biological animal, which he expected helped his low profile a little, but that animal was fox, which he knew did not.

And his business associates typically didn't make him feel so guilty about the work he did.

"Come on." Finnick's voice was garbled even though it didn't need to be - a little affectation in their software so they'd both know the encryption was still working. "What is possibly worth it in city center? You keep playing chicken with their firewalls you're going to end up in the Zoo."

"Nothing else to do," Nick lied. It would be more accurate to say there was nothing else he could stomach doing right now. Worry didn't suit him.

"I'm rolling in contracts, if you'd just help out," Finnick said. "Easy drops. Surveillance. I'm pretty sure a couple of them are actually legal. That never happens. I need more paws."

"I don't like Genesis," Nick repeated.

"So what?"

"So they're doing stuff that's way over the line. They're organized now, Fin. It doesn't matter if the government has rolled out _'rigorous new augmentation controls.'_ That doesn't excuse what's happening. Weaponized aug chips aren't even the worst of it."

Finnick's snort was static. "We're not supposed to know or care about that stuff, remember? I didn't know you made enough money to start having morals."

"That's easy for us to say. We're not the ones getting kidnapped and stripped for parts. You or me, we'd just end up dead."

"You've been at this too long to slip up like that, Nick," Finnick said. "You think I'm really going to send you something if it smells fishy?"

"It's not about how safe the aiding and abetting is, it's about the aiding and abetting in the first place."

The line fuzzed, this time with actual interference. "This is about that cop, isn't it? She really got into your fur."

Nick set his jaw and looked away to the headlines scrolling up one of his other screens, even though the link was pure audio.

"Gonna go join up with ZPD's hacker boys?" Finnick egged him. "Go straight? I'll bet that's a pay cut."

"Oh, save it," Nick said. "Do you not keep up with the news? The way things are going out there, you and I are going to go from _ignored_ to _top priority_ real quick. I'm going to keep my ears down for a while."

"It's been a whole week since you ran into her. You can't keep this up forever. What are you going to do to get paid?"

"I'm not running anything for a while. Not while there's so much pushback. The police really would arrest me, and that's the good ending."

"Doesn't leave much."

"Pet projects." Nick refreshed a trace and eyed the readouts from the disguised sensors he'd planted outside his door. He was getting himself jumpy. "Something. I'll figure it out."

"Whatever," Finnick said. "If you get hauled in for your enthusiasm with those official networks don't call me."

The line closed with a little animated snap. Nick stared after it for a while, until his probes pulled his attention away again.

Nick had refused to care about what was happening at first. Even that night in the tunnels, when he realized just how much some mammals had changed in response to the grim realities around them, Nick had told himself that he couldn't get too involved in the power struggles of the city or its servants. He wouldn't be able to do the work or make the money he needed if he strayed too close to a cop.

But Genesis had seemed to only get bolder in the few days since then. Mammals who asked too many questions, or saw things they shouldn't have, ended up dead. Kidnappings on augmented ones were climbing, or so the headlines warned. Animals were plugging military-grade interface chips into themselves, turning their augmentations into something closer to weapons they could use against each other or the increasingly busy police.

ZPD had cracked down. And it hadn't backfired at all. The police had brought in more illegal augmentation charges than ever. There were just more of them to arrest than ever. Making more noise than ever. Ratcheting tensions higher than ever.

So in the middle of all that, four days ago - when Judy Hopps had disappeared - Nick felt he could be forgiven for jumping to the worst-case scenario. That was why he was running all these risky scans now.

Absences happened sometimes, he'd reminded himself at first. Officers got assigned to special jobs that required they keep a low profile. Sometimes they were just on PTO, spending a long weekend unplugged somewhere.

But Nick knew those patterns, and this hadn't felt like one of them. Most of the time even his little software tools could still tease out some sign of a mammal's presence from the cameras and microphones and sensors all over the city. It was easier if they had augs, and even easier if they were exotic ones. Nick had pulled a few unique telltales from even Hopps' mostly closed system that might have come in useful.

But in almost a week she hadn't made a peep.

Now Nick was spending more time thinking about that than he should. It wasn't curiosity anymore, just for something he'd be able to use as ammo in their little verbal sparring sessions the next time they met. The news reports of clashes and ZPD checkpoints and the assault rate kept playing out on two and three screens at a time, even now as Nick pulled off his headset and stretched out on his couch to sleep. The city was destabilizing. She probably knew that better than he did, since she was on the front lines.

And Nick knew he wouldn't have kept it up this long unless he was already getting attached. She'd rocked him, that night in the tunnels. The whole thing was unsettling now, because he'd never wanted to see how his world might change so drastically and just sweep him along for the ride, the way it had her. And even though he still wasn't quite sure why - now he didn't want it to get any worse for either of them.

It had taken a good long look into her shiny new eyes to open his, it seemed.

\---

_The Docks_  
_1425_  
_five days after Judy's disappearance_

The programs hadn't turned up much, but what they did show was nothing good. The last glimpse the system got of Judy was approaching the dead drop location Nick had given over the last time she caught him smuggling hardware. Nick didn't know if it had been active the day she vanished. A week was a long time for that. Whoever his clients had been were probably rotating spots so none of their illegal trade stayed on one route for too long.

 _Whoever his clients had been._ He'd seen the maps. The docks were solidly Genesis territory. They probably had been from the beginning. They didn't advertise, not unless they were out in the middle of making a point, and wouldn't highlight their supply lines even then. But everyone who worked down here knew. He'd looked the other way, or done whatever else he had to to rationalize it.

Even with the low clouds threatening rain, there was enough traffic out here Nick was able to stand across the street in a coat with a high collar, flicking through nothing on his phone while he watched. It certainly looked quiet now, but then that was how dead drops were supposed to look. Maybe he should have taken a couple new delivery contracts after all. He'd have more reason to be hanging around.

How long had he been deluding himself? Playing along? Judy had been right. He should have gotten out and holed up inside the line with a nice legal gig, where none of this messy power fight ever showed. Now, instead, he was probably going deeper by the second. Painting that target on his back.

The way she did voluntarily from day one.

 _Oh, screw it._ Nick put his phone away.

Up close, the drop was just as quiet. It might have been unused right now, actually. The second breaker box on the right, the one disguised to appear locked solidly shut, was empty. Nick didn't know what that information bought him. It didn't betray anything about smuggling schedules, or vectors for the goods that passed through.

This was the sort of thing Judy must have done on a daily basis, he realized. At least she had the computing power of the whole law enforcement division behind her. Nick would have given a lot to have access to whatever she'd managed to assemble on the smuggling ring right now. He needed a lead.

Not that he was likely to get a nice illuminated sign, especially this time of day. The closest thing Nick saw to trouble on his way back to the train station was a big wolf, leaning on the jetty in a long coat like Nick's. He raised a battered thermos to his muzzle and Nick saw glimmering black prostheses showing under both cuffs. That didn't mean much on its own - more and more residents were getting augs every day - but most of the ones who got theirs through the official channels didn't look quite this rough.

The wolf didn't look over for long, though, and Nick was still downwind. He pretended not to notice the scrutiny and climbed onto the train.

He could stop at ZPD, he thought as the monorail arced around city center. Maybe she was there. Maybe she'd just been holed up and so busy she hadn't even left the department's closed networks for a few days. But Nick had no way to justify his showing up, not without spilling more about his activities - and her turning a blind eye to them - than would be safe. If something had happened to Judy, he suspected he was going to be learning about it on his own. Official assistance had to stay out of it.

\---

And it got worse, as Nick was paging through his old records later that night, chewing on cold noodles and watching the news. He didn't have much to go on: just names that were probably falsified, and contact information or locations that were used only briefly. He kept all of it heavily encrypted, just in case.

The night he'd last seen Judy was one of the last jobs he'd run since, because yes, he was unsettled. He'd kept to materials he was able to verify after that, even if it meant smuggling obnoxious things like food for fractions of what his commission had netted him before. He had't touched biotechnology since then. No interface chips.

On the screen to his right, a live news camera panned down ranks of ZPD officers in heavy armor. Nick looked for rabbit ears, just in case, but he hoped she wouldn't be stupid enough to put herself on a riot line like that. This feed was coming out of Canyonlands, where Nick could see a swarm of scrappy mammals stalking around on the street and making threat passes at the assembled police. Mostly predators, mostly augged. Was this another roundup? He hadn't known things were getting that bad so close to city center already.

ZPD was giving them their space, letting them screw up their own neighborhood if they wanted but otherwise not making any aggressive moves. Nick pulled his eyes away.

Judy would be digging up the same information about his last drop, trying to source them or find their final destination. Nick didn't know the latter, but he had at least one step in the chain of the former that she might not have tracked down yet. She hadn't asked him about it.

The contact who had passed him those was an old lion who ran an electronics shop down in Rainforest. He was as private as Nick, and even more careful when it came to his presences on the network. That alone shouldn't have hidden him from Nick's tracking software, but that was coming up blank, too. Nick paced and opened the IP phone on his headset.

"Came around after all?" Finnick asked. "I figured as much. I've got a thing coming up tomorrow."

"Fin, I just need some info. Do you know if something happened to Leon Stransky?"

Finnick sighed. "Stransky? Was he that fence down in the midlevels?"

"I think so." Nick watched a big rhino with a set of glittering titanium claws make angry gestures at the police.

" _Acquired,_ I think was the polite euphemism they used."

Nick felt his ears cool. He'd heard the stories. Judy might have seen couriers getting cleaned up for stepping out of line, but it happened to the other end of the supply chain, too. "By Genesis? When?"

"I don't know who. It went down a few days ago. What is this about? Are you working with that cop or something?"

"No," Nick said. It came out sharper than he'd intended, because his mind was running away from him as he stood there and watched. The rhino was carving furrows through the hood of a police cruiser. The metal crumpled and came away in his upgraded fists. "There are _enhanced_ citizens rioting on the south side of town right now. Just wondering if there are dots to connect."

Finnick grunted. "Your pushback's getting worse."

If Genesis had shut down Stransky, it was because he'd been compromised. That left Nick as a loose end, which was unsettling enough on its own.

But Genesis would only know there was a problem that far up the chain if its delivery had never arrived. ZPD - or more likely Judy herself - had stepped in too early.

And he'd told her where to go.

"Fin." Nick swallowed and had to look away from the angry images on the newsfeed again. "Where does Genesis take its victims? If it wants their augs?"

" _What?_ No idea," he said. "And we're both better off that way. Seriously, Nick, what are you doing?"

Great. "I'm trying to find someone."

"That little bunny cop. I knew it. You idiot, you need to drop this. You're going to get disappeared."

"Fin, if you know anything-"

"I promise you, I _don't._ " Finnick cut him off. "I haven't been stupid enough to get mixed up in something like that. You didn't used to be, either."

"Yeah." Motion caught his eye. The proximity camera above his door opened a priority window to show two tall figures - canids - wolves - not residents - standing in its field. Even over the grainy feed, Nick could see one of them sported a familiar long coat. They hadn't knocked.

Shit. Hanging around the docks was going to get him noticed eventually, but less than 12 hours had to be some kind of record.

Was it Genesis? It almost didn't matter. There was no time to debate the issue. He made a snap decision, based purely on his read of mammals that hadn't let him down yet, and knew he had to get out. If they were here for him - and who else would they be here for? - they weren't here to talk.

"I'll call you later," he snapped. "Keep your ears down."

"Nick-"

But he was closing the connection, hammering the emergency keystroke he'd set up all those months ago, just in case. His computer whirred and asked if he was sure he wanted full disk encryption.

One-two-three main drives, server, backup - all of the progress bars had started. They were as safe as he could make them. Nick yanked USB drives and pushed the laptop on his couch closed.

He threw a look around. His apartment was one room, not counting the closet of a bathroom. Most of it was computer monitors and the rest was couch. One exit. One window. The door telltale was glowing red for locked, but it was a plain old residential panel and wouldn't hold up to brute force as long as it would to software intrusion.

Not that he intended to be here for that. Nick slid the laptop into his beaten backpack, alongside his tablet. The window creaked a bit as he pushed it up to access the rickety fire escape. It was maybe the second time he'd opened it since he started living here.

It was both unsettling and gratifying how quickly his mind slipped into fugitive mode. He didn't know where he was going to go, or how long he was going to have to stay there. There was a decent amount of untraceable cash in the bag, and with his computers he'd be able to keep a network connection up. But he hadn't been homeless for a long while. Maybe he needed to go to ZPD after all, at least while there were mammals after him.

And because he was banking on them physically forcing the door, because he was waiting for the crash that would announce they'd made it through - they were after him sooner than he expected. Nick wasn't even to the bottom of the ladders before a lupine head poked out of his open window and looked down at him.

"Out here!"

They'd gone through his software blocks on the door like they weren't even there. Nick jumped the last four rungs and took off, headed north toward the more trafficked areas by the monorail station. When he risked a look back he saw both of the wolves negotiating the fire escape with more strength and speed than he ever could. They weren't after his data, then, and if it came down to a flat-ground race he was as good as caught. If they were armed-

_Don't think about that._

Nick diverted into a parking garage, where the lights were brighter. It fed onto the open plaza of station on the other end. There would be plenty of cameras. Hopefully plenty of eyes. Why did it already have to be midnight? He could hear claws ticking on the concrete behind him, and deep breathing. They were gaining.

He went left, and then right, down the rank of parked ground vehicles, and then a solid-feeling paw was reaching out from behind a support pillar to yank him bodily into cover. Nick's feet went out from under him.

"Don't move."

A snow leopard had him by the collar. She seemed to be counting. Nick drew breath to protest and she was gone, swinging around the pillar again to meet his first pursuer head-on. He heard a thump and a muffled crack, and a shout of surprise and pain. Someone tumbled to the ground, scraping metal against the cement.

By the time Nick was swinging around to look, his rescuer was already sprinting for the second wolf, with a stun baton crackling and ready to go in her paw. He didn't have time to swing his pistol into line. She intercepted his wrist with her own free paw, wrenching it to an unnatural angle - and sank the electric arc into the fur of his neck. Nick heard chattering teeth from back where he was.

It had taken maybe ten seconds, start to finish. The first wolf was still where he'd sprawled on the ground. The snow leopard crouched to retrieve the gun and secure cuffs to his partner's wrists.

When she straightened she was tall, with a long tail that swung behind her like a counterbalance. Now that she was moving slow enough to not be a blur, he could see the badge glimmering on her armored vest. She wore the same grey-and blue fatigues Judy did, rolled up to her elbows, with the same shock gauntlets.

 _ZPD._ Nick was glad he'd followed her directions.

"Nicholas Wilde?" She bent again to check on the first wolf and cuff his synthetic arms behind his back.

There was no point in denying it. "Yes."

Restraints snicked into place around his wrists, too.

"You're under arrest."


	3. Chapter 3

_En route to ZPD Precinct One Headquarters_  
_0006_  
_Six days after Judy's disappearance_

She'd hustled him away as soon as her backup arrived from wherever it had been hiding to process the wolves. Now he was sitting in the back of a cruiser as it made its way downtown.

Felony network intrusion. It made sense, now that Nick thought about it, and he'd always known there was a risk involved. But he though he would have been taken in in connection with Judy's disappearance first.

"Those weren't your wolves, I take it."

His arresting officer's eyes sharpened briefly in the rearview strip. _No,_ they seemed to say. _Those were his problem._

"Thanks anyway," he said.

She hadn't said more than five words to him since she'd locked him back here, and the mostly-silent treatment was making him nervous. She hadn't said what was coming next, or how long it would take.

Two cruisers blew by them the other way, lights going. Nick couldn't hear anything but the quiet hum of the drive thanks to the soundproofing, but he didn't need the sirens or the police radio chatter to guess ZPD was still working to address the unrest down in Canyonlands right now.

Not that he had much say in the matter, or any enthusiasm for what the alternative would have been - but this was the worst time to get arrested. There was the due process Nick knew he had a right to now that this situation was finally playing out for real - and there was the reality of ZPD's current situation. He could be cooling his heels in the Zoo for weeks before they got to him. Finnick wasn't about to come post bail for him in the meantime. Nick knew the little fox that well. Once he was through booking that would be it.  
And weeks, with the way things were out there right now-

It was worth a shot.

"Do you know what happened to Judy Hopps?"

It got her to look up again. "Anything you say here is admissible in court."

He knew that; she'd told him once already. But if the fear crawling around in his stomach was right, Judy didn't have whatever time it would take for his case to get to court. "She's missing, isn't she? For days now."

She took them right at the light, and stayed quiet.

"That's a yes, then." Nick persisted. "You probably already know I'm more associated with her than most. But if you wanted me for her disappearance you would have grabbed me way sooner. You're looking for her, too, aren't you?"

She had this unnerving way of studying him in that rearview, far longer than anyone should have been able to drive with their eyes off the road. Eventually she cut the wheel over again - not towards booking intake at the rear of the precinct headquarters, but to the darker vehicle pool at the edge of the compound. Nick couldn't help but wonder if he might have miscalculated.

His door opened, and Nick felt the crash webbing slacken and disengage.

"Out."

Nick pushed himself across the bench seat and stood in the cool night air. She directed him ahead of her, away from the vehicle, into the shadow of a service garage locked tight for the night. She stood there and seemed to be almost literally chewing something over. Her tail swept wide arcs behind her.

"Hopps disappeared on second patrol four days ago."

"And you're just getting to me now?"

"None of us have the luxury of time right now. Least of all her. If you know anything - it could save her life."

"Before I vanish into the Zoo, you mean."

"Well?"

"I can't help her from inside a cell." But then she had to know that. They wouldn't be out here talking if this was going according to whatever regulations she followed. "And you need me for something. You wouldn't have dropped those wolves otherwise."

Her eyes fixed him. "What do you want?"

Staying out of prison would be nice, but that wasn't the important part. It wasn't like he could go home tomorrow and expect things to return to normal. The wolves who had paid him a visit were dealt with, but they wouldn't be the last. It would still be risky to edge back into courier work. Someone had caught on that he was poking around where he shouldn't be, and Genesis and groups like it took leaks like that pretty seriously.

He'd committed to this as soon as he went down to the docks, Nick realized. This wasn't about him anymore - at least not directly. There would be no returning to the way things were, and if Judy had made as much progress as he had she was on borrowed time.

"I need to know why she's gone, too. I want to help find her," he repeated. "From this side. And I'm your only lead right now, aren't I? You can't afford to lose me into the Zoo, either."

She held up a paw, claws halfway out. They were biological, Nick saw. She hadn't replaced any limbs. Her eyes carried their natural sheen in the darkness and nothing more. So what made her special?

"What makes you sure you can help? You haven't shared anything."

She clearly didn't trust him. Nick was going to have to work with that.

But his bag was still sitting in the cruiser's evidence locker, and with it the data he'd taken when he'd fled. "I have a better chance than most. I'll need my computer back, though."

"I need more than that."

Nick sighed. "I have copies of Judy's - Hopps' - network trace. The telltales specific to her computers and augs. There's an antenna in my computer. If she's in range of a city network - cameras, audio, whatever - I can figure out where she is."

"It's that simple."

"I don't gain anything by stalling," Nick said. He shrugged. "I'm probably going to jail either way, telling you this. I know it's not legal. But I'll demonstrate it for you. I just need my computers back."

She watched him for another long minute, before her eyes defocused.

"Marki, dispatch. Cancel that process order."

Nick couldn't hear the response.

She looked at his cuffed wrists and seemed to decide he could keep them on a little longer. Her tail swirled and led the way back to the cruiser ahead of him. "I have something to show you."

\---

Even this time of night, the precinct headquarters was a hive of activity. Officers zipped around in full armor, or huddled in tight groups with armor nearby. Almost all of them were visibly augmented. He got a lot of looks, too, from rhinos with rippling myomer shoulders and from a cheetah who stalked by on skeletal cybernetic legs. Nick could hear the faint servos.

It was even worse than the headlines suggested. "You expecting a war or something?"

Marki spared him an ear. "Protests to contain."

They wound into the warren of an open-plan office on the lower floor. It was more quietly busy in here. Half the light came from the blue glow of computer monitors.

The desk in the corner she escorted him to was so buried under hardcopy and tablets it was impossible to see the surface. There was a deactivated monitor peering through what was almost a tunnel in the paperwork, and a magnetic bulletin board above all of it, littered with scraps of printout and newspaper headlines. A carrot-shaped pen sat on top of the tallest stack of binders. Nick stared at the incongruity.

"This is Hopps' desk," he floated.

Marki nodded. "That's your file on top."

Nick reached out to move the pen and open the battered red folio.

It was the largest single folder in the collection, stuffed completely full of incident reports and notes. A recent diptych, composited from surveillance footage. Images of his apartment building. Timetables. A complete DNA sequence.

Judy Hopps knew parts of him better than he did himself, it seemed. It should have made him uncomfortable, knowing someone was tracking him even more closely than he could them. He was as much her pet project as she was his - and from the looks of it, she'd been keeping him out of a lot of trouble over the years.

"She wanted us to keep an eye on you." Marki crossed her arms over her chest. "In case something happened to her."

"I knew the hack charge was an excuse to bring me in," Nick said. She would know it was likely safer here than he would be out on his own. He shook his head. "She would still be trying to arrest me."

"Tech says your computers are clean." She stepped back. "This way."

\---

Two levels down almost all the light was coming from computer screens - big arrays like the ones he'd left at home, and giant wall-mounted ones scrolling statistics and maps of the city. Nick could feel his eyes adjusting.

They trooped through a door marked FARADAY 1 set into one of the walls. There was a rabbit with glasses and charcoal striping on his cheeks and ears working at a wheeled computer cart in the center.

Like Judy. Nick tried not to let that show.

The technician looked up as they entered. "Sergeant."

"Savage."

He tilted his head to look at Nick. "Who's your friend?"

"Nicholas Wilde," Nick said. He could see his laptop open and scrolling diagnostics. Whoever this rabbit was, he'd cracked through Nick's passwords in no time. That was getting uncomfortably routine. He raised his cuffed wrists. "I'd shake your paw..."

"Oh, _you're_ the one messing with my firewalls." The rabbit's voice warmed. "You're almost as good as I am."

Nick let his paws drop to clink against his waist. "I got something out of them."

"We gave that to you." Savage eyed Marki. "On a hunch."

"Wilde says he has software tools that could locate Hopps."

"I'll want a demonstration before I give you any kind of real access to our networks," the rabbit said. "Nothing personal."

"Of course not. Can I have my paws back?"

The police shared another glance. Marki reached down with a magnetic key and removed the cuffs.

Nick donned his headset and pulled up the runtimes he needed. The technician was watching closely over his shoulder, not betraying any discomfort at being this close to a fox. Marki stood further back, keeping an eye on both of them.

"Hopps has a neural implant, right?" Nick looked over at Savage and the subtle surgical scars that always tended to show up as a slight depression on the brow, even underneath fur. "Like yours."

"Yes."

"Plus retinal prostheses, and a radio, and a couple other things." Nick swallowed his unease and typed. "Even if it's all locked down, the RF coming off of it tends to be unique from mammal to mammal. Point the right antennas at the signals and you can sort individuals from the noise." He stuck a claw at sets of spikes on the spectrograph. "There's my headset. Your implant and phone." He raised an eyebrow. "Sergeant Marki."

The last entity entry was a long list of signatures, only a few of which made immediate sense to Nick. He read and reread them, trying to make it look like he wasn't staring. She had an implant, yes, plus the dense patches that would be her service sidearms in shoulder holsters, and a couple other carrier signals he didn't recognize. But there was a lot of background scattering on the spectrum readout that wasn't targeted at all.

"But we're all on network here," Savage said. He glanced at the walls. "Or some network."

"RF mode doesn't even have to verify against addressing. See? My wireless is offline and it's still pulling all this."

Savage nodded. "Smart. And locations?"

There's another layer to match this data with feeds from radio towers and networked cameras," Nick said. "Obviously not going to work in here."

"Sergeant, I think he's onto something here."

"Bogo will need to clear it." She said. "Wilde, come here." She held out the cuffs again.

_"Really?"_

Her lips compressed.

Savage sighed. "Just leave him here with me, Sergeant. I'll lock him in until you get back."

She looked between them, and swapped her cuffs for the taser on her belt. She held it out to Savage and walked out.

"Sorry," the rabbit said after the door had hissed shut - and locked. He placed the pistol delicately on the desk, out of Nick's reach. "She takes her job seriously."

"Jack, is it?" Nick read his name tag. "She's saved my life already. I'm just messing with her at this point."

Savage paused and tilted his head again. "That makes you the most reckless fox I've ever met," he said.

"I'll be honest, I'm playing this whole thing by ear now."

Savage twitched one of his.

"No offense. I mean Genesis thugs just chased me out of my apartment." Nick tapped at his computer. "I don't have anything else I can do. Nothing safe."

Nothing that would let him look at himself in the mirror, knowing Judy had disappeared and he might have had something to do with it.

Things had started happening very fast to Nick Wilde in the last hours. He didn't believe in karma, or any higher power. He hadn't had time to think anything through but for the minutes he'd spent locked up in the back of a police cruiser. But the sense of obligation still felt almost physical.

"Did you know her?" Savage asked.

"Hopps?"

"Yes."

"I know Hopps," he said, correcting the tense. "In the way someone might know an overly enthusiastic parole officer. But she's never made an arrest stick."

"Not for lack of trying, I hear."

"Not at all." Marki had shown him her desk. Nick didn't know if he was ever going to get that file out of his head. So much time spent watching him. And for what? If nothing else, that was his reason for doing this right there. She'd thought he was worth the trouble, for whatever reason.

"This isn't supposed to happen," Savage said. He was running something on his own tablet, apparently analyzing Nick's own code and hardware to duplicate the effects. "Disappearances. ZPD hasn't lost an officer for a long time."

"You sound so sure it's over."

Savage winced. "I'm sorry. I'm not a field operative. I don't deal with what they do. Marki's- taking it hard."

"So so does have a cheerier side," Nick said.

"I wouldn't say that."

"What's her story, anyway?"

"She doesn't talk about it much," Savage said. "Former PSF."

That explained the competence. "What's augged?"

"What's not?" Savage asked. "You saw the readout. That much skeletal veneer and muscle enhancement, EM just bounces off of her." He adjusted his glasses.

"Some small-caliber bullets, too, probably." She looked so _normal_. It was like seeing Judy's new eyes, all over again. Nick had figured out why that bothered him, after a few nights of lying awake because they wouldn't leave him alone. Most augs showed more than that. You could tell what a mammal had given up to improve themselves. Even Savage had the _neural dent._

But his eyes were still biological behind his lenses. They weren't purple, or glowing. Nick looked away.

"Why did she do it?"

"Marki?"

"Judy."

He blinked. "I don't know. I don't get upstairs much."

"Would you do it? Trade your eyes for implants?"

The room was quiet enough to hear the vent fans going.

"I would think long and hard about it," Jack said at last. "For what it's worth, I'm sure she did, too."

Nick sighed at his careful expression. "I don't hate augs. Don't think that. I know they're useful."

"You don't have any, I noticed."

"Can't afford them, otherwise I'd probably have a computer in my head, too. The rest of it, though, the giving up-" Nick shook his head and went back to his keyboard. "It's so much change. So much risk."

He didn't like the feeling of having to keep up. He didn't like that Judy had become such a permanent part of a system that seemed to take more than it gave.

But it still beat the other possibility: that it was too late. That all of this was for nothing. He didn't want to think about that.

They both jumped as the door hissed. Marki was back.

"What do you need to locate Hopps?" she asked.

At least she seemed to operate on the assumption that Judy was still out there somewhere. She didn't trust him, not at all. But that was going to be assumed. Nick knew the police were using his expertise for damage control. He was here because he was their best tool for resolving the situation.

That was fine with him, because at least for now, their objectives aligned. He would get what he needed from them, too.

"Full network, for a start."

"Hardline." Savage held up a network cable from a spring-retracted spool in the wall.

"And anything about her last cases," Nick said. He plugged in. This would need scaling up. His software was fine for passive tracking, but now he needed it to work on his own schedule. How to do it? "Who she was investigating, and why. And her aug list, if you have access. This is going to take some fine-tuning."

"We can get that released." Maki approached to see his screen.

"I'm going to want more receiver than you have here, too," Nick said. His search was already running. "The more sensitivity I can scan with, the easier this will be."

"We have the best transceivers in the city." Savage sounded wounded.

"I mean I need something that's focused on looking," Nick said. His search had turned up two locations. One he knew was shuttered, because the funding cuts had been in the headlines he liked to keep up on. The other, on the very edge of town, up in the mountains-

"That will do nicely."


	4. Chapter 4

_Shale Peak radio observatory_  
_0530_  
_Six days after Judy's disappearance_

The gate was secured with an old-fashioned padlock. Marki came back from the cruiser with a pair of bolt cutters.

"Weird shape for a warrant," Nick said.

She hadn't glared like Judy yet, but she had a way of processing and ignoring information that was just as succinct. She didn't need to say anything about his poor timing, either. Nick decided to leave the levity out here with the car.

The enormous white dish sat on a flat-topped mountain, up above the last of the windswept pines. Its base doubled as the control room - which was also locked. This time, Marki took the less destructive approach and popped the electronic door with a breacher tool from her belt.

She followed instruction well enough, firing up breakers and computer systems while Nick opened his own laptop. He punched up coordinates and the antenna above them whirred into heavy motion.

"You'll point it at the city?"

"As close as I can," Nick said. "I don't know if it will depress all the way. But it will get us a lot of signal. Sorting through it might take longer."

His tail bristled as the patch speakers burst into white noise. He dialed them down to a low hiss and stared at the waveforms instead. They'd be able to discard most of this, assuming his computer had the juice to do it. It would match Judy's signatures if they were out there, but it was looking for them amid every cell phone call and radio broadcast and implant in the city. For now the lines and meters just danced wildly. He fine-tuned the gain.

_Come on, Carrots._

Ten and twenty minutes they watched the screens. To Nick's surprise, it was Marki who shifted first, in and out of his vision around the perimeter of the tiered control consoles, peering into utility closets and up the access ladder that led to the telescope's mechanism above them. When she wasn't looking around, her head was down. Probably listening to her implant comm.

The computer was slow to get possible matches, but every time it ran through the frequency range it was narrowing things down more and more.

Savage had sent along a dossier for him. Nick supposed he shouldn't have been surprised they had his email.

Judy wore a neural implant, like the rest of them. Her retinal prostheses were top of the line and would be emitting most of the unique signals he needed - if they weren't getting washed out, too. It was possible she was being jammed, but that would show up just as clearly, as a big microwave footprint, a sign that said _don't look here._

Her last known location, just like his own tracking had showed him, had been through the south edge of the Docks. It seemed she did a lot of chasing traffickers, hunting leads and movements outside the front lines. Was that an assignment or a choice, Nick wondered. Either way, she was good at it. His own file was proof of that. But unlike him, her last target had known ties to Genesis.

They must have been just waiting for an excuse.

Nick hadn't looked at his news feeds since he'd bailed out of his apartment. Now a push notification popped on his headset, for a joint release from ZPD's liaisons and city hall. A curfew was in effect, and the police had issued a travel advisory for south Canyonlands - right up against the Docks.

Nick could see Marki paused by the windows to the south, looking out at what little of Zootopia's infrastructure proper they could see from out here.

"The city just locked down."

"Genesis is pushing its luck on the southern perimeter," Marki said. She turned her head. "This is for residents' protection."

"Does that include me?"

"You're on special attachment to me while we look for Hopps."

Nick keyed one of the monitors over to news while he waited, even as he knew it wasn't going to help his mood.

There was at least one live stream down there, and it was even worse than he expected. It was last night's unrest all over again; but this time louder and much more fraught. ZPD was downright huddled in its defensive lines, well inside its own territory. Nick could see cars burning. Groups of augmented mammals tested the defenses in some places, probing until the stun batons and riot shields drove them back. There were pursuit police on the back line, pacing, waiting to isolate any targets that made it through.

"You're letting them roll over you," Nick said as Marki came back to watch. She shook her head.

"The harder we crack down, the greater the risk of backlash."

All this over aug controls. "If you give them any ground they're going to just keep pushing. You've already got your backlash."

"We have our orders, too."

Nick could still almost see the rhino from the night before in his mind, mincing that cruiser's steel plate like it was paper. What would augmented limbs do to riot shields? Would the cameras fixate on that when it happened, too?

It was bringing the feeling back, the one Nick had tried not to acknowledge back at the police station, the one that said even once they did pull off the miracle and track Judy down it wasn't going to be enough. Six days was a long time to hold out, even for a cop as strong and determined as she was. They all knew that.

"What happens when those orders means someone gets hurt, or killed?"

He could sense her focus shift, like a laser. "Someone might get hurt," Marki agreed. "If we don't follow orders, someone _will_."

"You sound like Judy."

The cat pushed off the counter and was gone. Nick didn't have much of a read on Marki yet, but she was as touchy about Judy as he was.

"Why chase her?" she asked. "What is she to you?"

 _Acquaintance_ wasn't right. She was more like the closest thing he had to a friend. Except whatever it was ran even deeper than that. Was it friendship, when he worried night after night about her safety? When she clearly worried about his? They'd known each other for years, technically. But they had only ever interacted as cop and scruffy underworlder.

Did that even matter? He was here now because that worry wouldn't leave him alone.

"A friend." Nick decided to simplify after all. He minimized the window that wasn't doing either of them any good and watched his spectrum combs instead. "What happened to her? Specifically."

"We don't know. No direct observation of the theater."

"What was she doing that far into Genesis turf anyway?"

"Chasing a _hunch_." Marki put extra emphasis on the word. She must not have used it often. "They tend to pan out."

Whether it had this time was almost moot. Nick wondered darkly how much of the escalating violence out there was thanks to what she'd done.

And thanks to what he'd enabled. There was no getting around that.

"Aug chips?" Nick turned to face her at the end of the row of consoles. "She was following interface hardware, wasn't she?"

Marki went still.

Nick had suspected, but to have it so tacitly confirmed made his heart sink even further. He'd told Judy to be careful, but his warnings hadn't been enough.

"Explain." Even from all the way over there, Marki's presence had turned dangerous.

"Her last position on the network was down at the docks," he said. "She got that bit of intel the last time we talked. The coordinates from the dead drop that started all this-" he waved at the city out the windows behind him. "They came from me."

The quiet hiss from the speakers might as well have been a roar. Her ears flattened.

"She trusted you."

"I'm right here, aren't I?" Nick shot back. "You can save it. I know what I did."

He'd seen Judy's desk. He knew the effort she put into him now. He had a feeling Marki hadn't been following orders when she'd taken him down there. She had wanted to know if she could rely on him, the same way Judy had. And now this...

Nick was spared looking Marki in the eye again, though, as his screens flashed for attention. 87 percent match, on the right frequencies. Nick fumbled for the controls, his introspection flushed in a burst of adrenaline. There it was again. He paused the sweep and tried to refine the hit further.

She came back. "Location?"

"Won't know until I can clean it up. But that's her implant, and there's a flutter in there that might be her augs, too. It's really quiet, though."

"Low power?"

"Or jamming."

The ping was garbled by everything else between them and it, but the frequencies only got more consistent as Nick fine-tuned the scope's aim.

Marki pulled a patch cable from the console and plugged it into an external radio from her belt. "Savage."

There was a chime in Nick's headset. Someone was inviting him to a conference call.

"-start working on it here, too," he heard the technician say. "Nice work, Wilde."

94 percent match. Now Nick started to let himself hope. "I'm going to cancel the rest of the search and figure out distance."

"Right." There was a pause. "There's a whole lot of something along with the signal here. Like interference. Something big in the way, I'd guess. That must be why it's so quiet. And my first pass says there's a pattern buried in here. Short. Repeating."

"Do you recognize it?" Marki asked.

"Too short for binary," he said. "And it's not integers. The timing's wrong. In Morse, it's... _8-O_. Number eight, letter O. Mean anything to anyone? I'm running a partial search but I don't expect much."

"Figure out where," Marki said. "Wilde?"

"It's chewing," he said, and keyed his display over to the large screen at the front of the room. The probability cone overlaid on the map kept shrinking. "Give it a minute."

8-O. That was nonsense, as far as he could tell. If Judy could get a signal out, why would she choose that? He tuned out whatever Savage was saying in his ear and tapped a claw on the console. Long-long-long-short-short-long-long-long. 8-O. A coordinate system? Shipping labels? _Come on, Wilde. Think like her._ 8-O. 8-O.

No.

 _Look where the network drops out._ Oh, she was smarter than any of them. Somehow, she knew he'd be here to catch this. "Savage, invert it."

"What?"

"Invert the signal. The gaps are the message. It's not 8-O. It's-"

"S-O-S." Marki was staring at the map.

"How were we supposed to spot that?" Savaged asked.

Nick's claws scraped on the counter. "She's alive."

And based on his program's best guess of signal strength, her message was coming-

From the docks. Right in the middle of Genesis home turf. Nick barely registered Marki's head dropping in his peripheral vision.

He'd been right next to her.

\---

Marki actually locked the door behind them, which was more than Nick was willing to take the time to do.

Savage had dropped off the call as soon as they'd started shutting down. Marki had tasked him with something. She'd been quiet, too, as they sped back down out of the mountains toward the city. Nick stared at a three-dimensional satellite map of the docks on his tablet, turning it around and around.

"You can't go in there."

Nick turned. "If Judy's going to risk that in the first place, so can I. What, you don't have any rules for civilians riding along?"

"Wilde." Marki blew a breath through her nose. "We're not going in there, either. The situation has deteriorated."

It took a second. Nick cranked around. _"What?"_

"You heard the advisory. We can't push all the way into the Docks." Marki looked haunted. "Everything south of Canyonlands is a mass of Genesis barricades right now. Officers are wounded."

He bristled. "Judy is _alive_."

"She's too deep, Wilde. Savage is running analysis. We think she's on a freighter somewhere. Behind every bit of muscle they have."

"So go through the muscle. I've seen yours. All of ZPD's." Nick stared. "Does none of that matter now? We found her, and none of you supersoldiers are going to even try for a rescue?"

"If ZPD goes in there now, the city turns into one big riot," she said. She reached out and notched the volume on the radio higher, so they could better hear someone calling for armed backup and medevac. "This has been coming in since I picked you up last night. You know this is one bad engagement away from a war."

"Judy knew the risks as well as you or I do, and she did her job anyway," Nick said. There was a growl leaking in now, but he was well past caring. "And now the poor little rabbit is all tapped out, trying to keep up with the big cats. She's dangling by one last thread and you're just going to cut her out of the picture."

Her claws were scratching against the steering wheel. "She would argue against it, too, Wilde. The stability of the city is too important to risk."

"You _used_ her. From the start." Nick turned, because he knew if he had to look at that level, noble expression for any longer he was going to either make her wreck, or he was going to get his tail kicked in a one-pawed fight before it even came to that. "You took her eyes. And now you won't even pick up the pieces."

This was just proof. He wished he could have made Judy see this, so she would understand how utterly replaceable she was. None of the permanent sacrifice or compromise she made amounted to anything. Not with the big picture in the way.

They hurtled past ZPD checkpoints, through the industrial districts on the edge of town. There was smoke palling in the air. Automated traffic signs were scrolling curfew details. Already, Nick couldn't see any residents out on the streets - just the occasional cruiser and even an officer or two, going fast enough on augmented legs to keep pace with their car before they angled off into the streets.

What happened to ZPD - to the rest of the city - wasn't his problem, he told himself. He'd spent his whole life ignoring what was happening to the world to skate by on the edges of legality. He didn't have to stop now.

But Nick had drawn a line, right where one of the only other mammals in that big city that mattered to him started to lose herself in it. Now his actions were directly harming other mammals, and he couldn't ignore that.

Nick still didn't know where the attachment came from. He didn't know what drove it or why it was suddenly so important. But the only way to see it through was to go along with it a little longer - even if he, the unaugged fox with a sudden conscience, was the only one who did.

"I can't stop," he said. "Not when this is my fault."

"Will this fix it? They'll kill you, too."

It cut all over again, to hear that Marki had already accepted the inevitable. "I'm not going to listen to you," Nick ground out. "I'm bad at listening to advice. Just like her."

The sudden braking threw him against his restraints. Marki took them off the main road and skidded to a halt in an alley, between the last of the tenements before the ground opened up to industrial warehouses to the east.

"Get out."

Just as before, there was no forcing the issue. Not with her combat augs. Nick pulled his webbing free and cracked the door.

Marki joined him, to stare at him over the hood.

"I can't take you any further. Not without sparking something that could get a lot of mammals killed."

"So that's it."

"I have my orders."

Nick clicked the straps of his pack into place. It was all shifting again. He didn't care anymore. "Her life is worth less than those orders?"

"Whatever happened to her is on my paws as much as it is yours, Wilde."

"You're not the one who's trying to fix what happened. You're not going to do anything to-"

 _"I was her backup,"_ Marki cut him off, all ice. "The day she disappeared. I let her push ahead, out of the recall line. Against our orders. Against my advice."

Nick hadn't thought the feeling in his gut could get any worse. But here they were, and the despair nearly drove him to take a swing at her anyway. Her chin came up at his fire.

"Then I hope they way you let her go haunts you for the rest of your life," he spat. "At least I'm going to do something with mine."

Marki just stood ramrod straight and took it. The only place it showed was the tightness in her eyes. "I can't make it any worse."

"You're a coward."

She drew a pistol from a holster in the small of her back before Nick could move.

"We all do what we have to," Marki said. Her tail swept. "And you're right. We live with it."

She gave him the gun, grip-first. Nick took it automatically. It was an older gunpowder model, and warm from body heat. Not regulation, then. He looked up at her, and Marki - guilty and reluctant and resigned and very, very old-looking - held his gaze.

"Eleven rounds."

"Marki."

"You might be able to call in a couple favors from Savage." It seemed to cost her an effort to turn and leave. "Be careful if you broadcast."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not how radio telescopes work, incidentally.


	5. Chapter 5

_Waterfront freight nexus 4_  
_0812_  
_Six days after Judy's disappearance_

It took Nick almost an hour to get close to the docks themselves, a trip made longer by having to hide in the shadows of warehouse alleys and crates to consult his map. Occasionally sounds of conflict - the sharp _snick_ of magnetics, or deeper noises of explosions - echoed from down the streets. At least he'd only seen two mammals since he'd started out.

The search program on his tablet was locked onto Judy's signal because it knew what to look for, but even from this close it was weaker than it had been in the mountains.

 _Long-long-long-short-short-long-long-long._ Over and over and over again. She wouldn't be doing it manually, then. And they still hadn't jammed her, otherwise she wouldn't be getting anything out at all.

Across two more streets he went, into the lee of a deserted gatehouse right across the service road from the docks. His map was pointing him straight at an enormous freighter moored to take on cargo.

Nick sat and listened. Nothing but the creak of metal and the slap of the waves against the pier. He reseated his headset.

"Savage, give me something." He blinked and sent video streaming over the link.

"It's a miracle you pulled anything out of that hull," the rabbit said. At least he was quick to respond. "Anything less than a telescope probably wouldn't have picked it up."

"Something useful. You can inflate my ego later."

"You'll probably get Hopps' signal better if you go in, but once you're inside I won't be getting anything from you. Not even with the satellite we're pulling to look at Sahara Square."

"It's spreading?"

"Yeah."

"Great. Where's Marki?"

A pause. "She hit our first checkpoints about ten minutes ago. Sounds like she's going slow and careful."

Nick put it out of his mind. If he wasted time thinking about what she'd said - what she'd _abandoned_ \- now, his best chance of getting Judy out of this slipped away. "Okay. Thanks."

"You be careful, too. Ping me when you get out and I'll guide you home."

When, not if. At least he was learning.

The line closed. Nick was on his own again. Just him and this really heavy gun, versus whoever was waiting for him in there between him and Judy.

He slipped past the main gangplank and made for the secondary, aft. No need to make things obvious. There weren't any other mammals around, or indeed on the deck. Maybe they'd all been pulled off thanks to the clashes to the north.

The ship was so massive it felt just like the dry land he'd left. It didn't roll at all. He hid up against the nearest lifeboat and waited again, just in case, and the surreality of what he was about to do ambushed him again. He knew next to nothing about ships, much less this specific one. He didn't know what its cargo was, or how it was laid out. He'd never fired a gun before in his life. Had never been in any position to shoot someone. Didn't know if he could.

But none of that mattered now. Nick sent his tablet's screen to his headset and started looking for a door to the interior.

His trace - now sans map - led him down sets of steep metal stairs, through hallways and corridors he could hear his breathing bouncing off of. The ship was spartan. Relatively new, and well-maintained, if dark. Almost all of the lights were out, except for the orange emergency ones every few doors. Twice Nick heard clattering elsewhere in the ship, and had to crouch against the walls until it subsided.

Now, Judy's signal was stronger than ever, even with the merry hell the bulkheads had to be playing with transmissions. He had an endpoint now, just ahead of him. He was at a T-junction with no clear way forward, and long hallways down to either side. He chose left, took a deep breath, and turned on his radio to transmit on the same frequency as her distress call.

"Carrots?"

Nothing. The chatter of the message continued in his ear.

"Come on, Carrots," he whispered. It still seemed unnaturally loud. "You've got to be here somewhere."

He jumped half a foot when the white-noise pattern cut off into ringing silence. If this was a trap-

If he'd been too late-

"You _idiot_."

Nick slumped against the wall. His throat threatened to close around the laugh.

"See, I knew you missed me."

"Where are you? Did you bring anyone?"

"Really close. There's a wall between me and you, I think." He checked the corner and eased into the next corridor. "I had to come alone."

"Oh, _Nick_. Okay." A pause. "Okay. I'm in the cargo hold. There are at least six mammals on board most of the time. Four wolves, a badger and a sheep. Augmented and armed."

Nick forced himself to keep moving. "I haven't seen anyone."

"They patrol, I think. Or go to the bridge and living quarters. I don't know where, or when."

"Are you okay? Can you move?"

"I'm shackled to a chair."

It was a fact. Something she had to tell him. And it squeezed at his heart anyway.

There were windows set about shoulder-height into the walls now; when he looked through them he could see a large room, open to the two decks below him. Service gantries ran around the outside and down the center, with active overhead lights every so often. There wasn't much stored there now; it was in fact nearly empty except for the cluster of long shipping containers on one end. Several of them looked like prefabricated structures: office space, or maybe housing.

Nick crept through the next door he could find. Now that he had a better angle, he could see through the narrow window of the nearest structure, the grey one stenciled with a faded red cross. It might have been an old army hospital unit. He could see a heavy padded examination chair, and a familiar set of ears.

"I'm above you now," he said. "There's a ladder in the center. I'm coming."

"Don't rush it," she warned.

"You listen for me."

But it stayed quiet, except for the click of his claws on the steplike rungs of the ladder. Nick crossed the open space and pushed through the heavy industrial curtain over the entrance, and found it hard to breathe.

Judy was cuffed with thick metal bands on the arms and footboard of the chair. She rolled her head as he entered and Nick looked into a pair of shining purple eyes he never wanted to let go of again. Her brow was furrowed in stress and pain, and there was a trickle of drying blood running from her right temple where someone had sliced through her fur and skin to get to the medical access panel for her implants.

"Nick."

He wedged his gun underneath his backpack's hip belt and crossed the little room. Her pulse hammered under his fingers, where he slipped a paw against her neck. She made to reach for him and clunked against her restraints.

She was _alive_. Alive and almost unhurt. He'd found her. Nick swapped paws, so he could run his thumb along the side of her brow that wasn't stained with blood. He could feel the tension as she pulled against the chair.

"It's okay. It's _okay_." He ducked his nose toward hers, close enough to feel her breath huffing against the top of his snout. " _I'm_ the idiot, huh?"

"Nick, I can barely see you."

He wanted to ignore the chill in his ears. "I'm getting you out of here. The doctors will take care of it." He had to let her go to open the shackles. The one on her ankles popped with a catch, but her wrists were locked closed.

Nick cast around. The bay seemed like an operating theater - not a place he was going to find something with a lot of leverage. He saw rows of sharp and spiky tools, arrayed on a tray with magnetic strips, and some kind of threatening-looking drill on an articulating arm above the chair.

"Genesis," Judy said. "They're not quiet about it."

"We figured."

"We?"

"Long story." The cabinets were full of paperwork and tablets. No good.

"I've been locked into long infrared for a couple days now," Judy said. "You're blurry and grayscale. Like a heatmap. I don't think they've seen retinal implants before. They must have screwed something up."

It meant they were taking it slow before they started cutting parts out of her. Nick put the thought out of his head. There. There was a standard toolbox in the corner. He seized a prybar and returned to Judy's chair.

He had to throw all of his weight into the move, but one catch cracked open and Judy's left paw was free. She reached for her other paw and pointed out a leverage spot.

"Here. It's-"

Those eyes cranked wide open and she looked past him, and now Nick heard it, too. Hard, pounding feet, right behind them.

Nick turned in time to watch the tendrils of the curtain explode aside. The ram was _huge_ , with silvery synthetic arms and obnoxious chrome overlays on the horns he'd lowered for the charge.

The prybar Nick held up took most of it, but it slammed against Nick's chest anyway and crushed him back against the chair. He felt something crack. The tool clattered away.

_"Nick!"_

He was still between this mook and Judy, slumped against the chair, but there was no time for anything else. The ram was raising those arms, and of course, _of course_ he'd opted for claws instead of hooves, and augs against natural limbs only ended one way.

And then Judy reached across Nick's front, snatching the pistol out of his belt and putting three wild, unaimed rounds into the ram from point-blank range. The noise was incredible - and gone as soon as it had roared in. Brass - and a lifeless body - fell to the deck.

"I thought you couldn't see," he panted.

"I'll just let him hit you next time, then." Judy let her paw and the butt of the gun drop to rest against his chest. "They'll have heard that. You okay?"

"I"m okay." Nick coughed on the powder smoke and realized maybe he wasn't. His chest was on fire. He got his feet under him anyway and retrieved the crowbar.

"Where did you get this thing?"

Nick heaved - _oh, that hurt_ \- and the last shackle snapped open. He pulled Judy to her feet and put his paws on her shoulders. "It's Sergeant Marki's."

Her brow knitted. "And you're here alone."

"Really long story," Nick said. "We need to go. Can you climb a ladder?"

"I can." Judy held out the gun. "Here."

"Keep it. I've never shot one before."

She huffed. "Do you trust my eyes or not?"

His claws caught against her uniform as he squeezed. "Come on. There's a gantry in the middle. All the way up and out the way I came in."

\---

Nick had to stop at the top of the climb so he could catch his breath. He pressed a paw to his chest.

"How many others?"

"Five, probably. Maybe more." Judy's ears rotated back at him from where she was squinting into the hallway. "Nick?"

"You're going to worry about me right now?" Nick took the lead, keeping her close behind him.

"I'm the one with the gun. And your breathing's rough."

"That ram didn't know how to hit. I'll be okay."

"Nick, I can do this. At least stay out of my firing arc." She had a paw on his elbow. He looked down at her. "Long IR is going to work fine up here in the dark, anyway. Just watch our backs."

His every instinct was to _carry_ Judy out of here. But she was right. Even hurt - as badly as he was, if not worse - even half-blind thanks to the rummaging these extremists had done in her skull, she knew more about the tactics of something like this.

So watch her back he would.

There were no alarms. No sudden lights or blaring sirens. But they knew someone had discovered them as soon as it happened, because bulkheads all over the ship started locking down with a series of metallic bangs. Watching ahead of them, Nick could see the route he'd taken in suddenly shut off. Judy glanced up at him.

"This way." She took them right at the next intersection. She didn't know where they were going any better than Nick did, but she was so confident he let her guide them anyway. Left and right they went, until he, too, saw the red-illuminated exit signs she must have already noticed. Clever bunny.

But in no time at all, shouts and the thump of running feet reached them through the corridors again.

"Five left," Judy repeated, almost to herself. "Sorry, Nick. It's bad odds."

"You have eight rounds," he said. "Make them count."

They were almost to the T-junction ahead of them when Judy froze.

"You hear that?"

Nick strained for it, but she was already pushing him back.

"Get cover, quick. Back there."

It was just a stanchion where a few pipes jutted out from the wall, halfway back down the hall. But Nick could hear it now, too. Claws in their corridor. More than one pair. And there was nowhere else to go. He stacked up behind her, and she didn't protest when he eased a shoulder to her right side, to keep her just a bit more protected as she lined up her shot. It would be a long one with a pistol, even if she wasn't breathing fast. Even if she could see.

A wolf pounded around the corner, far enough into the open for Judy to shoot him, twice in the chest. Six rounds left. Four targets. Their margin was shrinking.

And his two buddies behind him weren't going to be as easy, not with the element of surprise gone. They were still at the junction, with the luxury of better cover and a lot more ammo. Already their incoming fire was kicking sparks off the metal bulkheads and whirring down the open hallway. Magnetics. Nick pressed himself closer.

"We can't stay here," Judy panted.

"They've got to reload sometime," he said. "Give me the gun."

But there was no shot. Every time Nick leaned out of their tenuous cover, they sent him right back into it. He felt a near miss ruffle the fur on his arm.

Worse, one of the wolves was using the cover fire to advance down the corridor. If he got an angle this was all over. Nick heard Judy cry out as another round cracked into the pipes by her head. Her paw came away from her forehead red, this time with fresh blood from a shrapnel graze.

Panic and desperation made him squeeze off another useless shot toward the junction. The wolf ducked.

But he didn't stop his slow advance.

Nick looked down at Judy - really looked into her frightened, determined, damaged eyes - and came to the latest in the string of total decisions that had taken over his life in these few short days. There was nothing for it. He needed a better angle. And if it gave Judy better odds of getting out, gave her one less target to worry about - it would have to be worth it.

"Stay down."

She was too fast for that. "You can't."

But he could already hear a new sound - even more feet, from behind them this time. Her ears were sharpening it, too. They'd been flanked.

"Judy-"

"Don't do it. Please, Nick."

"Please, just stay. Promise me."

She was breathing so fast, digging claws into his arms so hard they hurt - but she nodded.

It wasn't how he wanted to repay her. But the way he saw it, he already owed her every chance he could give her. He'd gotten her into this, way back in the tunnels, with a box of smuggled chips. Now it was on him to try to get her out.

He swung all the way around the corner to aim, something tugged at his right shoulder-

And a blur of grey hit the wolf on backstop so hard he left a trail of blood on the opposite bulkhead. His companion turned. Nick hit the deck.

Marki's grouping lifted the aug off his shiny metal feet. He collapsed in a heap.

"Wilde!"

He stared at the ceiling. "Sergeant-"

"The cruiser is three blocks west, in the north alley." Marki addressed it to both of them. "Wilde, get up. How many left?"

"Two, at least. Nick?" Judy appeared over him. "Oh, no. Nick."

She was pulling him to his feet. How was she so strong?

"Hopps."

"It's his shoulder," she said. Wait, _his_ shoulder? "Shallow. He got skimmed."

Marki put herself between them and the remaining noise. "Move fast. Their backup is closing on the ship."

It was a bit easier said than done, with what had to be a broken rib and - yes - a right arm that didn't seem to want to move. He was bleeding from somewhere, just like Judy was from her new cut. But they staggered on, out of the claustrophobic corridors and into a sunlight so strong Judy had to squeeze her eyes shut.

"It's too bright."

"I've got you," he said, even if it might have been a lie. Nick kept his one functioning paw wrapped around her shoulders and guided them both down the gangplank. There was no sign of that backup, at least not yet. But more gunfire rattled from the interior of the ship, modulating oddly through the metal corridors.

"Savage!"

"You have about a minute," he came back. "Go left after the jetty. Your car's in the alley."

They made the end of the pier. Nick still didn't feel up to a run, but a fast trot was doable. He kept Judy in front of him the whole way, just in case. Now he could hear the whine of motors, converging on the barge. Ahead of them, peeking around the corner, was the familiar nose of a car in ZPD livery. As they approached, its running lights activated. Judy's shoulders hitched as she sighed in relief.

"I'm glad that still works."

"Was that you?"

"Yeah."

There was the thump and chatter of heavy engagement behind them. Nick turned to see Marki _catching up_ as only an aug could, in a zigzag dash to make herself a hard target. One of the Genesis vehicles was blown out and gouting smoke, but the others were already turning this way. This was going to be a fast exit.

There was no room in the front for both of them. Nick pulled the rear door open and followed Judy inside. Marki vaulted the hood and took the controls.

"Buckle up."

Acceleration rammed him back against the stiff material of the security couch. Nick ignored his restraints long enough to see to Judy, but she was pushing at him, too. She had the medkit open between them, and tugged at the material of his shirt to open it and bare his shoulder. She slapped something adhesive and reeking of antiseptic over a wound he didn't remember receiving. Her claws prickled.

"It's okay, Judy."

"Nick, you got _shot,_ " she gulped. She fumbled the single-use sharp of painkiller. He took it from her paws and jabbed it into his shoulder, below the dressing.

"Ow."

The last time he'd been in the back of a cruiser, he hadn't known if she was even alive. Now - now was still worse than he ever wanted it. But with that layer between them and the world, with the chance to push the medkit out of the way, he could feel her finally, finally let something go that she had to have held in check for days. Her paws shook.

"Nick, I'm sorry."

He took her fingers, stiff and curled from the sudden stress, stained with blood from her brow, and squeezed them over and over between his until she started to relax. She pushed underneath his chin, against whatever he'd done to his chest, but that pain didn't matter right now. The world blurred by out the tinted windows as they sped toward the perimeter, and he held her close, where she would be safe, and let her breathe.


	6. Chapter 6

_Zootopia General - Augmentation wing recovery ward_  
_1856_  
_The day Judy came back_

Nick nursed a cup of terrible coffee with his left hand and watched out the window at the end of the long hallway, because the alternative was standing in the ward itself and watching the telesurgery system stick all its long probes against and into Judy's eyes.

Yes, he had been shot. Or at least winged. There was a shaved patch under the new dressing on his shoulder now, and he was supposed to keep his arm in this sling for at least a week while the muscle healed. It would help with his cracked ribs, too, which weren't severe enough to do much but wait until they knitted naturally.

He'd been able to stay here the whole time, at Judy's insistence. He wasn't going to argue. There was nowhere else for him to go, and with the city the way it was right now he didn't want to leave, either.

There was a soft noise behind him. He turned to see Marki step out of the ward.

"Wilde."

"Hello, Sergeant."

She crossed to stand next to him at the window. "How's your arm?"

"I'll get it back soon enough. Thanks for the medical attention."

He was never going to see her smile, it seemed. The closest she ever got was a swing of her big tail.

"Judy wants to see you."

Judy, not Hopps. He looked back at the sealed ward door. "I thought she was still under the knife."

"She wanted to give her debrief before I left."

That sounded like Judy. Nick wondered what it was going to take to get her to slow down, and decided if this didn't do it, he'd rather not know.

"I'm taking official responsibility for her extraction," Marki went on. "Nothing that happened between the night we met and now will reflect on you."

"I've heard that one before."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Something Judy said once."

She watched him take another drink. "I told her what you did in my place. What I couldn't."

"You came back." Nick shook his head before she could start into it. "That's all that matters."

"I should have never left." She held up a paw as he drew breath. "There's always an exception to the rules. I didn't want to risk that. I was wrong."

It was hard to do _demure_ with a half-full cup of coffee and a bad arm. "You saved our lives back there. We're square. And for what it's worth I'm about to go talk Judy into being better about following the rules in the first place."

Neither of them needed to bring up what they'd said to each other before they parted ways in the alley. The words weren't important, and they both understood that. There was no moral superiority that mattered. Their shared concern for Judy pushed them both into things they weren't comfortable with, and they were both learning to deal with that.

"She seems restless." Marki ducked her head. "I won't keep you."

The recovery ward lights were at half strength as Nick entered. The spindly surgery bot was still collapsing itself back into its alcove, leaving Judy sitting halfway upright in the recovery bed. There was still some medical instrument on her head. She looked up.

"Nick?"

"Right here."

Her unerring ears tracked him as he got closer, but her gaze was aimed off into space.

"I'll take your word for it. I can't see external light right now."

Nick bristled, and watched her ears twitched in response. "I thought the doctors said they were going to fix the damage."

"They did." Judy held out a paw, only barely off-target. He took it anyway and stepped closer. "It's okay, Nick. Doc is just resetting all of my firmware, to the clinic defaults." She indicated the blinking headband that was looped over the bandages on her skull. "They want to make sure Genesis didn't add or remove anything important."

"This is what happens when you have computers for eyes," Nick said. "It's just more attack surface." He really wasn't feeling humorous right now.

Judy chewed her lip. "I'm going to be all week resetting preferences."

"Can you see anything?"

"Test patterns. Flashes. Nothing through my irises, though."

It still felt so strange to hear that. But while it used to make him uncomfortable, almost panicked, now it was different. They were already starting to morph from _hardware_ to a natural part of her expression. Part of what made Judy _Judy_. There was some comfort to their subtle glow, not that he would ever let her actually see how deeply he was looking now. She'd be picking up on enough, the way he was holding onto her paw.

"You came for me."

He squeezed her tighter. "You are one lucky rabbit I was the one looking for you. Savage was never going to spot your little inversion trick."

"I stumped ZPD's best slicer?"

Nick nudged her. "You're not allowed to be happy about any of this, Carrots."

"I couldn't risk them picking up on anything obvious," she said. "And after we last met I made sure Marki knew to go find you if something went wrong."

It had been a huge gamble, but Nick didn't have any ground to blame her for it right now. He didn't know if she knew that ZPD had been ready to cut her out of the picture, and he wasn't about to fill her in. Not now. Not yet.

"Marki told me what happened," she said eventually.

Nick trusted his paw would be getting his point across. He debated shrugging out of the sling again, just for the moment.

"She's just doing her job, Nick," Judy persisted. "If you've got to hold someone responsible, it needs to be me. This was all my fault."

"You could try not being so incredibly reckless," Nick managed.

"Did she tell you what happened to me in the first place?"

"Enough."

Judy got a slight frown. "I got overeager. Ignored my orders, and hers. She blames herself for how that went down, even now. I think that's why she came back, because she wouldn't have been able to live with herself otherwise."

He sighed. "And you only went out there because I gave you a location to go to. I'm never surrendering contraband biochips to you again."

"I thought I'd shocked that lesson into you already."

There was the muffled wail of a siren speeding by outside. Nick could see her ears tracking it.

"Let someone else deal with the emergencies for a while," he said.

"Not much choice," she said. "I'm going to be driving a desk for a while, until Bogo clears me for field duty again. But at least I can help."

Here it went again. "Straight back into it, huh?"

Judy's patient look wasn't aimed quite at him. The faint light flickered in her eyes. "I can't just sit by, Nick. These Genesis players - the kidnapping and murders have to stop. I heard things, while I was down there. They couldn't turn off my ears."

"You briefed Marki."

"It won't wait for me. This city is in worse shape than ever."

"So are you, if you hadn't noticed," Nick said. He risked a left paw on her cheek, well clear of her injury. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to give him better access. "Six days off the grid, with head trauma and who knows what else."

"None of us can hide from our responsibilities just because some of them are dangerous."

"Not like this, Carrots. You need rest."

Nick wished she _could_ hide, with everything she'd been through. She needed some kind of break before her minders threw her right back into the deep end. Before she jumped in herself, despite the cautions and the warnings and maybe even despite the fact that he didn't want her to leave him, to go back to a world that could turn on her so quickly.

He could tell her that, right here, and it might not make a difference.

"I just want you to be careful." He had to soften it somehow, and this was as close as he could get without just saying it outright. Her fur was soft under his thumb. "More careful. You know I'm right."

Nick knew it was irrational, to think Judy was ever going to reconsider the work that she did. He wouldn't be able to get between her and that for more than a few days while she recovered. She loved it too much. She was too responsible. She knew why she couldn't leave the duty she'd assumed to someone else.

But Nick didn't even need her to look at him to know Judy meant it, because he'd experienced that same reminder. He knew why, too.

He'd felt it when he'd first seen her desk, with its paperwork stacked high, all filled out with that carrot pen. He'd felt it scrambling down his fire escape with enforcers on his heels, and while he was creeping across the dockyards with eleven rounds in an unfamiliar pistol and no backup at all.

He knew how powerful that sense of commitment could be, how reckless it could make someone. He knew, even if he hadn't recognized it for what it was until it was pulling at him, driving him to sacrifice and compromise and risk his life for the rabbit in this hospital bed, again and again, without a second thought.

He'd learned that. The long, difficult way, the same way Marki had compromised what she had to for Judy, the same way Judy herself had, in service of something she thought was worth it. Sometimes there was no preserving a status quo that had to change. Sometimes, all he could do was find the safest way through for him, and for the ones he cared about.

Judy's eyes flickered again. She blinked them and sat further up against her cushions. When she turned to him her paw tightened against him. "Oh, _Nick._ You're back."

Her smile was infectious. "Technically, I never left."

She took in his own wrappings. "You got shot."

"That's giving him a lot of credit. Genesis doesn't hire its mooks for their aim."

"You got shot because of me." 

"I'll be fine, Carrots. Just give it a couple of days."

She was trying to arch an eyebrow at him from under her bandages, it looked like. But she stopped, and drew her paw away from him to pinch the bridge of her nose.

"You okay?"

"Headache. It comes with the first light after diagnostics."

Nick kept his paw against her neck, where she was leaning into it, and held his tongue.

"I'm not saying I'm going back out there tomorrow like nothing has changed," she said. "You were right. The things I did to Marki, and to you-" She swallowed and reached for him again. "I won't put you through that again. I know I have to slow down next time, before I pull everyone else down with me."

As she looked at him - really looked at him - Nick knew there was only one way to help her get past this. And as she reached for him again, to move her careful paw up to his neck, he felt as surely about it as he had anything else in the last week.

He wouldn't be able to leave her and go back to what he'd done for so many years. He couldn't face that alone, any more than she could. It was as dangerous as anything she did, except if he fouled it up there wouldn't be someone charging to his rescue, no matter how close a watch she kept on him. The rules and orders and big picture wouldn't let her.

And it supported something he couldn't be a part of. She'd made him take a good unflinching look at that.

"I think you were right, too," he said. "That night down in the tunnels. I'm more useful in one piece. On this side."

Judy was never supposed to look so happy with bandages wrapped around her head. But she was beaming.

"Took you long enough, fox."

Nick reached to cover her paw with his right one after all, and pressed her closer. "The way I see it, when you get into trouble again-"

She fought the laugh. "If."

" _When._ You know you're going to."

Judy narrowed her eyes at him, and it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

"And when you do," he continued, "You should at least have someone watching your back."

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://falke-scribblings.tumblr.com/)


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